Dick expected to die in his sleep and he didn’t mind a bit, in fact he was quite looking forward to it. After several months of dithering, he finally had taken possession of a motorized bicycle. He had never driven a bike before. He didn’t even know if ‘drive’ was the correct verb, or if it was proper to call it a ‘bike’ at all. He wanted to call it a scooter, but that made him feel like Dennis the Menace, so he called it ‘the fucking bike’. The owner had taken him down to the beach, showed him more or less how it worked and issued dire warnings against the power of first gear, which would later be repeated by Dick’s genial neighbour. He tootled around for twenty minutes, coughed up 12,000 pesos and launched
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